Xbox Live Hacked? Microsoft Still Says No.

Earlier this week, British tabloid The Sunran a story, pointing to a series of "phishing" con jobs that were putting Xbox 360 owners at risk.

It sounded overblown -- phishing scams are hardly new -- but the paper cited a light night meeting with Xbox brass in its "exclusive" story.

Microsoft responded to the claims, stating that there was no hack and stressing measures it was taking to improve security. Today, however, The Sun ran another story, stating that Xbox Live has been hacked, and Xbox 360 gamers are saying Microsoft is covering up the hack. From The Sun:

...dozens of angry readers contacted The Sun to tell how crooks bought Microsoft Points on their accounts to trade on to users in countries like China, Nigeria and Russia - even though they didn't pass on any personal details or visit phishing websites.

Many victims of the scam exposed by The Sun have been hit for multiple purchases of £42.50 - just under the limit that most banks check.

The points, the currency of Microsoft games, have then been sold on to other players abroad.

"I was a victim but had not given out any personal details," gamer Matthew Moore told The Sun.

As website CVG pointed out, this could be old news. It could also be new incident.

This morning, Microsoft responded (via website MCV) to these latest claims that Xbox Live was hacked, stating, "As we commented on Tuesday, the Xbox Live service has not been hacked. However, we are investigating a number of recent customer complaints relating to Xbox Live customer service -- particularly in the way that we have processed refunds to customers that have been victims of phishing related fraud.

"Consequently, we are taking several steps to address and resolve these particular issues as soon as possible and working closely with our affected customers to investigate and resolve any unauthorised charges made to their accounts resulting from recent phishing scams.

"Finally we would like to apologise to any customers who have not experienced a good service from us."

Kotaku is following up with Microsoft regarding the issue and will update this post should the company comment.

Normally I would agree, but I know of one person that was hit personally and they aren't the type of person to get done by a phishing scam.

I'm not saying MS were hacked, it's probably more an EA problem (but the issues are isolated to the 360, so I don't know), but I will suggest that something really fishy IS going on, and I think MS can be partly responsible as they should be doing more to stop it.

The end result is that people are using Live accounts to buy FIFA packs, which are then sold online for profit, it's been going on for quite sometime.

It's more likely that afflicted users unknowingly had malware, especially keyloggers installed on their PC's and got done for either using common passwords among their many different accounts or using their regular hotmail/MSN account as their Xbox Live account as well.

Exactly. MS would have improved security after Sony hacks. Xbox live is probably the most secure platform to play on, seeing how you have to pay to play online. However, if it wee to be hacked, a lot of valuable info would be taken.

Call me naive if you want but I suppose it comes down to whether you believe you can keep the hack secret, clearly you do which I would call naive.
If you do run a false albeit believable story then later it comes out you've been hacked I'd say you've done worse for your reputation as now your inept and dishonest.
And if you have been hacked eventually (as we saw with all the others) its going to come out in the wash.

It's probably more a case of some idiot fell for a scam and gave their account details away - no measure of security will ever make people smarter, sadly. This hardly means XBL was hacked.

Though I do still enjoy all the people reassuring themselves that XBL could never be hacked. Any system is hackable children, and I mean ANY. Don't ever assume your service/platform of choice is immune for any reason. PSN and Steam have both been done so far. Remain vigilant.

I was hit by this, i never gave out any details and have always changed my password on a regulor basis and they still got my access, i technally lost my account for two weeks, but both my bank and Microsoft reinbursed eveything.

Daily Mail ran a similar story as well on their front page (no surprise there).

They made it out to be phishing (they didn't actually say that, but said that people were sent emails directing them to a site with free points, they just had to give their credit card information). And stupid people believed it was a major hack and Microsoft were responsible.

If this all links back to Fifa though... would any security vulnerabilities lie with EA? They do, after all, run separate servers that are outside Live and outside Microsoft's control (all their games, Fifa included, don't actually run on Live but use Live as a way to get to the EA servers, from my understanding).

If it's related to attacks against third party services that your XBox Live (or PSN) account is attached to, (Such as U-Play, Origin, GFWL, whatever) then it's a pretty bad sign that it's being exploited. It's like a two accounts for the price of one for hackers.